Source: www.goethe.de For more than 50 years, the Goethe-Institut has acted as a mediator of language and culture all around the world.     Together with a number of partners, it is now launching the international project “The power of language” as a theme to run for over a year. The focus is primarily on the role languages (should) play in our world. In what form is language a point of reference for one’s own national identity? What will multilingualism look like in the future? How and where are languages a...

Source: mentalfloss.com Infographic: Alberto Lucas Lopéz Proportional Map of the World’s Largest Languages   There are 7 billion people on earth and about 7000 languages, but more than half of the world’s population speaks one of just 23 languages. This infographic, created by Alberto Lucas Lopézfor the South China Morning Post, shows the relative size of speaker population for all the languages that have over 50 million speakers (based on data from Ethnologue). It shows, quite strikingly, how giant the...

Source: mentalfloss.com Don’t „Chai“ and „Tea“ Both Mean the Same Thing? Photo source: pixabay.com   Next time you order a chai tea from your corner coffee shop, take a moment and appreciate your killer multi-lingual skills. After all, etymologically speaking, the words “chai” and “tea” refer to exactly the same thing, just in different languages. So what’s the deal? Almost 5,000 years ago, when folks in China started sipping a yummy, steeped beverage made from dried leaves and buds,...

Source: mentalfloss.com Study Shows All Languages Skew Towards Happiness   Photo source: pixabay.com Yes, even on Twitter, more words—of all languages—are positive than negative. A team of scientists at the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation set out to test the 1969 Pollyanna Hypothesis—which posited that human language skews positive, indicating a overall optimist outlook—by tracking many billions of words across 10 languages and 24 types of sources including books, news outlets, social media,...

Source: http://mentalfloss.com Video link: youtu.be 8 Endangered Languages That Could Soon Disappear Endangered is a word we usually associate with animal species, but some languages, too, are dying breeds. There are over 6000 languages spoken in the world today, but many are at risk of becoming extinct and forgotten. It is estimated that if language decline continues as it has been, half of the world’s languages could be wiped off the map by the end of this century. While some languages that are considered endangered...

Source: qz.com Ella Frances Sanders, a writer and illustrator, has compiled some of the most evocative words from around the world in a new illustrated book, Lost in Translation. Here are some that we think might be useful at work, at home, and everywhere else: The Malaysians say it best. (Ella Frances Sanders/Penguin Random House) Warmduscher, in German, refers to a Goldilocks-like person who only takes warm showers, implying that he is a bit of wimp. Gurfa, in Arabic, is the amount of water than can be held in one...

Source: http://mentalfloss.com Are you bilingual, trilingual, or multilingual? Or, are you a polyglot or hyperpolyglot? Perhaps you are monolingual, but aspire to learn other languages. Photo source: pixabay.com   Are you bilingual, trilingual, or multilingual? Or, are you a polyglot or hyperpolyglot? Perhaps you are monolingual, but aspire to learn other languages. If you do speak one or more foreign languages, you certainly have been asked, “How many languages do you know?” This a challenging question to answer....

Source: qz.com Graphics created by: Instagram Mapping and translating the emoji universe on Instagram. Nearly 40% of text comments on Instagram contain at least one emoji, making the photo-sharing app a ripe dataset for analysis of how people use the expressive symbols on their phones. The image above, recently published by Instagram, maps the relationships among emoji; those closer together are more closely associated in everyday use. Instagram found it could discern the intended meaning of emoji based on words that...

Source: www.npr.org In The Hospital, A Bad Translation Can Destroy A Life   Translating from one language to another is a tricky business, and when it comes to interpreting between a doctor and patient, the stakes are even higher. Consider the story of 18-year-old baseball player Willie Ramirez. In 1980, Ramirez was taken to a South Florida hospital in a coma, says Helen Eby, a certified medical interpreter in Oregon. „His family apparently used the word ‚intoxicado‘ to talk about this...

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com An A to Z of Noah Webster’s Finest Forgotten Words   October 16 is World Dictionary Day, marking the birthday of the great American lexicographer Noah Webster. Born in Connecticut in 1758, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, but it was his two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language published in 1828 (when he was 70 years old) that earned him his place in history as the foremost lexicographer of American...